Guest Post: KIYOSHI'S WALK

I'm happy to host a guest post by author Mark Karlins with the back-story on his recently published book, Kiyoshi's Walk (Lee & Low, 2021), illustrated by Nicole Wong, in which a young boy explores the question, "Where do poems come from?" on a walk with this grandfather who shares his own haiku writing process. 

Here's the scoop on the author and illustrator: Mark Karlins is the author of six picture books, two books of poetry for adults, and a number of reviews and essays on poetry. He runs poetry workshops for children and teenagers and has also taught at a number of colleges, including the MFA Program in Writing for Children and Young Adults at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Nicole Wong is a full-time illustrator with a BFA degree from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her twenty-plus books include Three Lost Seeds: Stories of Becoming; No Monkeys, No Chocolate; and illustrations for Andrea Cheng's Only One Year, published by Lee & Low Books. She lives in Fall River, Massachusetts, with her husband, daughter, two sleepy cats and two hyperactive dogs.

 Mark Karlins writes:

One of the reasons I write picture books is to make discoveries. I want to surprise myself. The surprise can come when the story I’m writing shifts from its original direction and winds up in a place I hadn’t imagined, or when a character reveals parts of him or herself I didn’t expect. Sometimes the surprise emerges in the language itself, in words that open doors. And it is just such alive words that Kiyoshi discovers in the poem he writes near the end of Kiyoshi’s Walk.

    “Where do poems come from?” That is the first question Kiyoshi asks his Grandfather Eto. That question forms the emotional heart and structure of the book. The two of them set off on a walk through the city, a walk that proves to be a journey in search of clues for poetry writing. From his grandfather and the haikus his grandfather writes, Kiyoshi learns that poems come from careful seeing, from listening, from imagining. He realizes that poems are all around us in the commonplace things of the world. And, through poetry writing, he draws ever closer to his grandfather.

    In many ways, Kiyoshi (and hopefully the young audience for Kiyoshi’s Walk) learns that poetry writing is a matter of mindfulness. Writing is an act of attention and an act of empathy. At the end of his journey, Kiyoshi, who learns to see the world more clearly, writes a poem. For him, it is a moment of revelation and joy, a charged moment in which he realizes that poems come from a joining of inner and outer worlds.

    Why haiku? Why is this the type of poetry Kiyoshi and his grandfather write? One answer I would give is that the short form of the haiku is accessible to children and the writing of it gives them confidence in their own abilities as writers. This self-assurance is what Kiyoshi discovers. He moves toward mastery and we all need that, young and old, children in the real world and children in picture books. And he does this not by writing haiku about traditional subjects, but by seeing that haiku can be about anything. He engages both with poetry and the world.

    Before writing

Kiyoshi’s Walk, I had pretty much thought of poetry writing as a private endeavor. While writing the book I discovered that it could be a joint activity, in this case between grandparent and grandchild. It becomes a bridge and helps to bond them. Poetry, I realize, can also bond parents and children. It can bond children to each other in a classroom, particularly through linked poems and through sharing the poetic process, and it can even bond teachers and librarians to children. 

    Perhaps I’m just a poetry idealist, but I like to picture the teacher who offers poetry writing to his or her class as the students’ favorite teacher, the one remembered years after graduation. Such a teacher will not only offer poetry to the class, but she or he will listen to the students and their poems. As a retired teacher myself, I feel that one of the best gifts I gave to students was my ability to really listen to them, to let them know their voices were important.

    I must admit that I enjoyed writing a book in which poetry is front and center. By the mere fact of its centrality, the book is saying that poetry and poetry writing are important. As it does for Kiyoshi, I would suggest that poetry can become an indispensible  part of our lives, that it can deepen us and give us something other than the busyness of contemporary life. Children need this. Poetry can sharpen their perceptions and their ideas about themselves and the world. Maybe I’m lacking in humility and hoping for too much in thinking about poetry as having such a vital role in the lives of children. Maybe it’s just my poetry-idealism that’s speaking. Maybe it’s just my belief in children.

Me: Thank you, Mark, for sharing the story behind the writing of Kyoshi's Walk and for sharing your beliefs about the power of poetry in children's lives. Now head on over to TeacherDance  where Linda is hosting Poetry Friday.